Sunday, May 22, 2011

REAL MADRID want to sell Cristiano Ronaldo to Manchester City for a staggering £150million. The Spanish giants know City are the only club who could afford the world-record fee.

And despite denials coming from Eastlands about any move for former United superstar Ron, Spanish sources claim the Blues ARE talking to Real about a possible deal. The fee will even make billionaires City wince but it would be an astonishing move were Ronaldo to return to the North West where he was such a hero at Old Trafford.

United fans would be furious if he were to do a Carlos Tevez and sign up with the enemy.

Lonely Planet describes Lago Agrio as an "unkempt oil town, not high on tourists' lists" and advises that any visitors should "keep their heads down". This scruffy, sometimes scary, outpost of north-east Ecuador is where Antonio Valencia was born and spent much of his youth either playing football barefoot or helping his mother sell drinks outside a sports stadium.

Carved out of Amazonian jungle when, in the early 1960s, oil was discovered and Texaco began drilling, Lago Agrio has suffered for its black gold. While an amalgam of appalling pollution and destruction of rainforest became the subject of a lawsuit involving Texaco's parent company, Chevron, local problems have been further exacerbated by a flood of refugees from the cocaine wars raging across the nearby Colombian border. "Kidnapping is a problem," says Valencia, who ensured his parents and six siblings moved to Quito, Ecuador's capital, once he exported his skills to Europe. "But I had a very happy childhood."